Long life with Christ

Christian spiritual formation is developmental. It moves from less complex forms to more complex forms. This is not to depict it in a structural-cognitive developmental way. It does not occur in discrete, invariant, hierarchical, sequential stages. Rather than necessarily progressive, the movement is processional. Regression and fixation are possible. Christians may forget their first love. Calling it developmental implies that it is in process and is dynamic. Human development is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for spiritual formation.

Christian spiritual formation as developmental reminds us that it is not static and unchanging. It is changing, and many times this frightens us. Consider for instance, the first time an adolescent questions faith. The reaction of the parent or adult is to squelch the questions in hopes of saving the faith of the adolescent. We know, however, that the questions will come, that life is changing, and that attempting to squelch the growth of Christian faith is as detrimental as attempting to retard the physical growth of our children.

Christian spiritual formation also includes critical periods, or calls "teachable moments." These are moments when a person is ready to learn or understand a concept. There are times as well when people are not ready to deal with certain issues. People’s life courses may take them in certain directions that affect growth in faith. Traumatic experiences are the most obvious example of this. The loss of a loved one or unexpected grief or joy may precipitate growth in faith.

Understanding Christian spiritual formation as developmental make us both comfortable and uncomfortable. It allows us to relax when we realize that we are on a journey and have a long way to go. It also creates a sense of responsibility as we realize that we are called to an ever-growing faith. The maturing that we exhibited yesterday is not sufficient for today.

When we say the Christian journey is a process, we express a truth that is both well known and unknown at the same time. If you ask most Christians about their spiritual pilgrimage, they will say that it is a day-by-day experience with its ups and downs, its victories and defeats, and its successes and failures. In brief, it is a process.

We live in an instant gratification culture. We have generally come to expect immediate returns on our investments of time and resources. If we have a need, we have only to find the right place, product or procedure and invest the right amount of time, energy, and resources, and our need will be met. It is not surprising that we tend to become impatient with any process of development that requires of us more than a limited involvement of our time and energies. If we do not receive the desired results almost instantly, we become impatient and frustrated. Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness. Or we try to create the atmosphere for the "right" spiritual moment, that "perfect" setting in which God can touch us into instantaneous wholeness. If only we can find the right trick, the right book or the right guru, go to the right retreat; hear the right sermon, instantly we will be transformed into a new person at a new level of spirituality and wholeness. It is not that right techniques, right methods and right programs are not beneficial. Nor should we minimize the importance of transforming spiritual moments on our pilgrimage. All these are important. But there is something about the nature of spiritual wholeness and the growth toward that wholeness that is very much a process.

Spiritual growth is, in large measure, patterned on the nature of physical growth. There are spurts of growth in our spiritual development. For a while we may live on a plateau of life and relationship with God. What we don’t realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation, a time in which we don’t feel as if we are going anywhere, a phase of life in which our relationship with God seems weak or non-existent, the time of dryness, of darkness—what the mothers and fathers of the church speak of as the desert experience, the dark night of the soul-is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see.

The hidden work of God is a nurturing that prepares us for what appears to be a quantum leap forward. What we see as the quantum leap may actually be only the smallest part of what has been going on in a long, steady process of grace, working far beyond our knowing and understanding, to bring us to the point where we are ready for God to move us into a new level of spiritual awareness and a new depth of wholeness in relationship with God in Christ. There simply is no instantaneous event of putting your quarter in the slot and seeing spiritual formation drop down where you can reach it, whole and complete. The idea of spiritual growth as a continuous process rubs harshly against the deeply ingrained instant-gratification mode of our culture.

Spiritual growth involves both conversion and nurture. There is the Conversion and there are conversions. The Conversion is required of us all and will include a change of the total self. It is a reorientation or metanoia that includes what we believe, how we live, and how we feel, a reorientation to right belief, right practice, and right passion. This reorientation is described by Jesus in John 3 as a new birth. There are also those continuing moments of coming to our senses when we turn further toward God. We are being converted. The initial conversion is just the beginning of a series of conversions that leads us further to the call of Christian maturing. Conversion and nurture function together; formation and transformation are an ongoing process. Nurture can and must lead persons to recognize their need for conversion. We must also remember that conversion creates a whole new situation that demands ongoing nurture and formation.

Christian spiritual formation is also interactive. It is an interactive process that includes the person himself or herself, the family, the culture of origin, the historical moment in which one is living, and the involvement of the Holy Spirit in the person’s life. Christian formation must be understood as including each of these elements, but it must also be understood as greater than the sum of its parts. A mysterious interaction of all of these elements influences Christian growth.

Often when we begin to realize that genuine spiritual growth is a continuous and sometimes difficult process, we may be tempted to think that it is an option we can take or leave. Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation. Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives—all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image—destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them. We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace or carriers of the sickness of the world.

Spiritual formation is not an option. The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.

The Christian journey is an intentional and continual commitment to a lifelong process of growth toward wholeness in Christ. It is a process of "growing up in every way into Him, who is the head, into Christ" (Eph. 4:15), until we "attain to ...mature personhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). It is for this purpose that God is present and active in every moment of our lives.